Born to the purple, or how Black Panther uses costume colours (Patreon)

Porphyrogenitus was a greek word that was somewhat of a slang term. It meant “born to the purple” a bit like our “born with a silver spoon in your mouth”. Purple, a rich and rare colour to produce a dye for, was understood in many ancient societies - Egyptian, Persian, Roman and Greek - to be the colour of royalty.

The last queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, was a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a descendant of Ptolemy, and Ptolemy, and Cleopatra, and Ptolemy, and Ptolemy. Real talk here, these guys were phenomenally terrible at naming their children. They were also really bad at not fucking their brothers or murdering their children, but maybe that’s for a different day. 

Cleopatra, the famous queen - not to be confused with Cleopatra or Cleopatra - actually had some children when she was defeated by the first Roman Emperor Augustus. She had twins with Mark Antony - a boy she named Alexander after Alexander the Great, and a girl she named Cleopatra (fucking hell). This Cleopatra, Cleopatra Selene, eventually married king Juba of Mauretania, who as well as being a king was somewhat of a scholar and somewhat of a businessman. He had figured out how to make a purple dye from shellfish, and of course this meant he could make the purplest purples you’ve ever seen. Together they had a boy and a girl. The boy was called Ptolemy, because of fucking course he was and the girl’s name has been lost in the historical records, but you know what I’d put my money on her name being? Drusilla, because I think that’s a lovely name.

So eventually Ptolemy of Mauretania grew up and began to rule Mauretania, at the time a client state of Rome, and you bet he had the purplest purples you’ve ever seen, and he was quite possibly able to make a good buck selling his purples to kings and queens who wanted to show off just how purple they could be. One day, he went to visit his second cousin, the emperor of Rome, to talk politics and probably show off his purples. According to popular account, the crowds in Rome were struck by the amazing purples that Ptolemy had to show off when he went to meet the emperor. The emperor at this time was Caligula, and if you know anything about Roman history you can already guess how this story goes. And so ended the Ptolemaic dynasty.

Marvel has, in case you hadn’t noticed, a bit of a thing for sympathetic villains. They want you to care about both sides of a conflict. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk brought an entirely new dimension to the character of the Kingpin that had been flat in many ways before. Michael Keaton’s casting as The Vulture was not only great because of his stellar performance and the perspective the character gave on Tony Stark’s neglect of the working class, but also on some level, just because Michael Keaton was Batman, and now he’s a bad guy. One of their best villains - if not their best villain - to date, however, is Erik Kilmonger.

Kilmonger is really scary but at the same time very charismatic, and given the historic and ongoing oppression of black people in white society and worldwide (RACISTS PLEASE JUST SKIP THIS VIDEO) his message of a black revenge on white people is honestly… not that hard to get behind.
Not just that but they gave him the most relatable attribute possible. He’s called Erik, just like me. It’s like… how did you know Marvel?

Ryan Coogler, director of Black Panther, did an excellent breakdown of the casino scene. One of the things that really struck me was how he talked about the use of costume colour. T’Challa, Nakia and Okoye are wearing black, green and red respectively. He says that beyond these being the colours of the pan-african flag (badass) there is also a colour-coded theme of “tradition vs innovation”. Red represents tradition and green represents innovation.

“This is a moment that’s been in the script since the first draft - this idea of Okoye the traditionalist Wakandan just being tired of this wig. She makes comments to Nakia that she doesn’t wanna have it on in the first place, so as soon as the fights jumps off she finds a way to take it off.”

I’ve seen elsewhere, discussions of the colour blue representing colonisation in Black Panther. The white characters wear blue, and Kilmonger wears blue, a symbol of what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would call “colonization of the mind”, the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways in which a colonising society makes a person from a colonised group continue their own subjugation internally.

Kilmonger of course, marks himself with a little scar for every life he takes. In a society that privileges white people - a white supremacist society - the system is inherently violent to people of colour. In Decolonizing Dialectics, George Ciccariello-Maher wrote:

“For those relegated to nonbeing and condemned to invisibility, to even appear is a violent act - because it is violent to the structures of the world and because it will inevitably be treated as such.”

While in white supremacist societies, black skin is an inherent and inescapable violence, because of the way the society is constructed against black people, Kilmonger wears his violence on his skin, and it covers most of his body. The scars represent people he has killed, so in a way are the symbolic of the “violence of appearance” that Ciccariello-Maher talks about, but at the same, they are scars, because Kilmonger is physically harming himself. This could be seen as representing the violence that black people do to themselves to mitigate the violence of their appearance.

James Baldwin, the author, said in an interview:

“One sees this inevitably in the faces of the people you are dealing with. It means: if I’m not what he mistakes me to be, that means I have a standard of judgement which is not his, which I may then be using to judge him. [...] This is a threat to the American personality as it has so far been constituted. It is a threat to their definition of the world. It is a threat to what they think reality is.”
If black skin represents this much of a threat to white society, the mitigation black people have to do to protect themselves from the backlash to that threat is immense.

Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks:

“The Martinican does not compare himself with the white man qua father, leader, God; he compares himself with his fellow against the pattern of the white man.”

Kilmonger compares himself with T’Challa against a pattern given to him by a white western society. A common criticism of Superhero films is that heroes always fight someone who is just an evil version of themselves, and Black Panther culminates in T’Challa in a Black Panther suit fighting Kilmonger in a Black Panther suit. This bothered me too the first time I saw the film. After such a fantastic, operatic storyline, the climax of the film is two CGI men hitting each other? However, this scene brings the colour coding of the film to the fore, with T’Challa and Kilmonger smashing into each other releasing bright bursts of colour, reflecting the Black Panther suits that as we were shown earlier, they chose from a set.

Kilmonger, comparing himself against the pattern of the white man, has chosen what in modern white societies means wealth and royalty - gold. T’Challa, heir to the throne of Wakanda, son of a proud tradition of a country that has never been colonised, wears purple. The same purple as Juba of Mauretania wore and the same purple that the film shows as the power of the Black Panther. The Heart-shaped Herb, the vibranium flower that grows only in Wakanda, blooms purple. 

Purple, a colour usually kept away from men in the west, is especially meaningful in this film that seeks to reclaim pride in ways that it has been denied. T’Challa wears purple in a powerful way. T’Challa’s masculinity is not fragile, is not toxic, and doesn’t seek to put others down. He just wants to do what is right, and good, and he doesn’t position himself above the women around him by virtue of being a man. In fact, the women in his life argue with him as equals or overrule him as people with more authority, and he respects their opinions, wisdom and expertise.

Kilmonger on the other hand uses his girlfriend as a tool to help him get what he wants, and then disposes of her when another man tries to use her against him.

Kilmonger’s point of view is so thoroughly colonised that when he passes into the world beyond during his inaugural ceremony, he meets his father in their Oakland apartment, rather than their ancestors on the African plains as T’Challa did.

Only at the end does he realise that his oppression is so permeating and so internalised, that he could never have been the Wakandan king he wanted to be. During their fight T’Challa tells him “You want to see us become just like the people you hate so much.” He responds “I learn from my enemies”, but T’Challa replies “You have become them.”

As Kilmonger dies, he shows that he has realised the extent of this internalised oppression. I am reminded of the scene from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods in which Anansi appears to a group of soon-to-be slaves on a slave ship, and tells them how awful the future is for black people in America, inspiring them to sink the ship, killing themselves with their captors.

“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships, because they knew that death was better than bondage” - Erik Kilmonger